National Postal Vote Investigation Needed

This is something that really needs to be tackled, but it is a big job and I don't know whether all the facts and figures will even be available.

What needs to be done, in order to ascertain whether last Thursday's election was valid, is for the following sets of figures to be obtained, for every constituency:

1. The number of postal votes for each party, or the number of in-person/proxy votes (the other can be obtained by subtracting that figure from the total for that party;
2. Electorate size;
3. Turnout for this election compared with that for the previous (2005) election, adjusting for any changed boundaries since that time.

The plan is to see whether something distinctly odd has happened since 2005. It might even be useful to have the figures for the 2001 election as well, as postal voting on demand came in between those two previous elections. If the postal votes have shot up from 2005 to 2010, but most or all of the difference favours one party, then one must at least be suspicious, and such instances warrant detailed investigation.

Hopefully such vitally important documents such as the marked Electoral Registers will not "go missing". If I were a Returning Officer I'd have had a small team (including myself) scanning in every page of the entire register over this past weekend, and ensuring that secure backup copies of all those scans were made.

I'd have an additional, encrypted backup on a pocket USB drive (such as I have used for years for my own data) to take away and store safely away from any possibility of tampering, at least until I was satisfied that all those who needed and were entitled to the data had their own copies.

I'm a stickler for this sort of thing, and take such responsibilities very seriously. let's hope that actual Returning Officers have taken their own precautions and successfully retained this and other data relating to the election.

Now we await the outcomes of the various police investigations into nationwide allegations of postal vote fraud, and hopefully a professional-grade researcher getting hold of all the info I listed above and publishing the findings and conclusions.